


One of Those Nights

by ElvenMaia



Category: Chronicles of Narnia (Movies), Chronicles of Narnia - All Media Types, Chronicles of Narnia - C. S. Lewis
Genre: Family, Family Feels, Gen, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Protective Siblings, Sibling Bonding, Sibling Love, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-08
Updated: 2020-08-08
Packaged: 2021-03-05 22:35:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,113
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25792987
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ElvenMaia/pseuds/ElvenMaia
Summary: A particularly cold night leaves dark memories lurking right beneath the surface of Edmund’s composure, threatening to shatter him but for a sibling’s love and consideration. Sorta fluff... if you squint.
Relationships: Edmund Pevensie & Lucy Pevensie
Comments: 4
Kudos: 30





	One of Those Nights

**Disclaimer: I own nothing you recognize.  
**

**A/N:** I have a headcanon that there was a shard of Jadis’ wand still embedded in Ed’s torso, thus bringing these sort of attacks on certain cold nights (kind of like PTSD I suppose.)

One of Those Nights

Edmund Pevensie sighs despondently from his little niche between the refreshment table and the wall, staring absently through the inescapable gape of the window.

It is difficult to turn away from the chill emanating from the glass panes; a blatantly stark blue beaming through the warm light pooling from a string of lanterns hung about the room.

The cold is an enchanting thing. It touches your skin with a lightness that beguiles the fangs hidden behind frosty lips. You let the cold in, warily, and it would sweep to and fro, ruffling your hair and toying with your scarves and coats as if in admonishment.

‘ _You mustn’t fear me,_ ’ the breath would mist in your ear, silky, smooth, entrancing, with a promising caress to your cheek.

Then she would take you off guard: the cold, she would. Baring her fangs and plunging into your flesh with a vehement hiss. You would quake, shiver, bat her away but ever she comes and you can do nothing to escape her swirling cocoon.

Edmund attempts to tear his mind away from it all. Instead he tries concentrating on the low drone of voices about him, pick out a pair of dancer’s feet and rant on about the absurd trend of impractical high heels as they click-clack about the dance floor.

_Negative times positive equals negative._

( _Appearance is deceiving, giving no prelude to the intent layered beneath. But the eyes... the eyes are the window to the soul..._ )

_The window..._

His near-frantic inner indignant prattle on high-heels is once again quenched by the pale blue of the window, streaking a wide beam through the shroud of warmth. Forlorn it seems, almost, but for the sudden rattle of snow against the panes, and the intolerable shrieking of wind about the corners of the house.

But then it dies down to a wailing lull; forlorn, aching. The gentle caress that brushes past. But Edmund knows that it is all a façade. _I will not fall prey to the cold again._

He tucks his coat more firmly about his shoulders, leaning into the corner and gazing at the hearth on the opposite side of the room with longing. He ponders how he has been reduced to cringing under the critical brows of strangers as they pass him, swaddled up in his coat as he is.

The window teases his periphery. He steels his eyes to the flickering fire in the hearth instead. People pass between the fire and him. The warmth is lost in a sea of swaying couples.

More than anything, Edmund wants to leave this— _this_ —he can’t even remember why he is here. Something under Susan’s proposition, at least he can recall as much.

But it frustrates him. He is supposed to _know_ , he is supposed to remember everything. The most observant of his siblings he has always been. The irk toddles in his line of attention, scoffing and judging just like the bodies blocking him from the fire ahead. The irk is a mask for his fear.

_Positive times positive equals positive._

_(Iron sharpens iron...)_

“Hullo, Ed. Cold much?” The voice knifes through his attention and he darts to face it.

_Cold...? No, no I’m warm. So very...very..warm..._

_A flurry of russet fur and a white-tipped tail. The cold: she swirls around and around, seeking the merest crack in his defenses, the merest crumbling of mortar or false door behind a drape of ivy._

_(Armies can be killed; swords, parried. But what can be done to brace against the immaterial?)_

_The glitter of slate eyes. The arching of a mesh-worked pillar of stone. A flash of light, piercing, blinding, cold._

_—The russet is no more._

“Ed?”

Again he is startled. It irks him.

“Hm? Oh yes, I am quite well, thank you.”

Another pair of scoffing brows and then the diversion is gone.

_You don’t know, oh who can ever know?_

( _Ever are we trailed,_

_always are we running._

_You must think yourself the hunter,_

_to escape the fated maw of grim reality,_

_That ‘tis all an illusion conjured to deter_

_that we really are the hunted.)_

The window is out of his line of sight; the barest sliver of the cowering blue light pooling on the creaking wooden tiles of the floor. But it is as a hook into his unconscious.

_Inescapable_...

‘ _Mine, mine, MINE!’_

Before he knows it, his breaths come in and out faster, shaking through his constricted airways. Before he knows it, the needy embrace of the cold lady has slipped her needles into his bones and they rattle with the sheer intensity of it. Before he knows it, his fingers are clamped to the corner of the table as a tether to the real world as he braces for the inevitable—

_Wave_.

A monstrous, overbearing _wave_ that crashes into him and washes any thoughts clean out of his feebly grasping mind. His defenses wither and bend and snap under the force of it and the frail corpse of his will is the only obstruction that prevents this certain wave from penetrating him completely.

He had known that wave was coming and barely has a moment between them to breathe and ready himself for the next one.

This time he cannot resist it. Edmund doesn’t even realize that his eyes are pressed closed as the wave drives into him, resonating in the cursed little niche lodged in his flesh. Every nerve is set alight and it ignites the fire that sends sparks shattering across the back of his eyelids. It’s all he can do to keep his feet.

An echo of the warm light fades in the midst of the smoldering blackness and his eyes inch open. The walls of the corner prod his back and the tingling of his fingers sets his eyes to his whitening knuckles still desperately grasping the edge of the table.

If he had any less experience he would think that the vicious attack of the cold was gone, but for just a few seconds. He can feel the inklings of it begin to stir at the back of his sixth sense once more.

_You need to leave,_ Edmund tells himself. _Get away from prying eyes and lingering scoffs._

‘ _You need not fear me._ ’ The voice slithers like a viper into a newborn’s cradle.

‘ _My king...’_

_‘Be my king...’_

_Hang it all and get out of here before you make a fool of yourself, Pevensie!_

_‘Hush now, m—‘_

_There_. In the crowd, a bobbing shape snags his fleeting attention as his broken mind scrambles to pile up the scraps of his defenses before the cold of the tide breaks in again.

_It’s Lucy. Of course it’s Lucy. Kind, warm Lucy. She knows_. She’s looking for him.

His mind whimpers for her but he finds his lips glued together and all he can do is plead with his eyes like a calf being led to slaughter.

Her eyes catch his for a moment in between the bustling crowd and he can only watch. Watch the translucent ends of her fur cap waft with her movement. The lively bounce in the curls of her chocolate brown locks. Her deep brown irises swirling with cutting, sincere concern so that a warm tingle shoots up his spine and for a moment—just for a moment—he feels safe.

But feelings are an uncertain thing, as are appearances, yet in a perhaps more tender way. Emotions are stored in close proximity to your heart where masks can be as fleeting and easily exchanged as the deliberate passing of seasons.

Edmund is caught off guard and the wave rushes into him in double-time, slamming his defenses to hapless shards with hardly a puff of exertion. Clouds of darkness frost over the edges of his vision and Lucy is drowned in the crowd.

_Get out, get out, get OUT!_

_Breath in, breath out, breath in—_

_~Grey wind, whistling through the trees in the melancholy orchestra of a death-march.~_

_Think of something else!_ reason shrieks before being driven out of his head by the mad spray of the tide seeping, probing, _searching_ with relentless desire to _devour_.

_Negative times negative equals positive._

_How can a thing so utterly, chillingly cold feel so, so hot..?_

The galaxy erupts in a flurry of stars, spinning in a roiling chaos that leaves him dizzy and breathless.

The echo of a wail worms through his misery, now a mere whisper. _Get away... get away..._

_~A zing of power as life is compacted into stone. A thud as the imprisoned carcass rolls into the grass so vibrantly deceiving to what is now pressed into its soil; another hapless being, an expression of nobility chiseled into it and Edmund thinks this one small mercy; that the defiance for liberty remained imprinted on the creature’s face when breath was chased out of lungs never to draw air—free or otherwise—in again.~_

A familiar sensation snaps and crackles about his ears. Edmund knows it, recognized it with a small wave of his own fury. It does little but sizzle in the vast, immeasurable cold weathering at him now.

It is Her. This was the doing of Jadis all along. A bit of her is in him, knifed into his flesh as one thing, yes, but it is what she planted in his mind that he grapples with.

Edmund wants to run. To get away and release the scream forming in his tight chest. His fingers grip the table. His knuckles are white now, almost like snow. He _hates_ white. He _hates_ this paralyzing sensation that leaves him frozen in such a horrendous way akin to Her presence that he finds every part of himself resenting it.

Warmth stirs near him and he frantically bashes against the ice that has encased his mind entirely. A hand grasps his and every fiber of his being is drawn to the warmth. He rises, higher and higher, leaving the frost to crack the remains of the war that had been waged inside.

Edmund forces his eyes open and is met with a startling splash of warm colors that encased such an achingly familiar kindness and acceptance; a nurturing love. What a distinct change it was.

Her fingers are prying his from the table, murmuring soothing nothings on a rush of breath that is tinged with admonishment. Edmund finds that he has been completely brought back from the depths of his inner carnage.

_Bless you, Lucy_ , he thinks, with feeling.

She has his hand and is leading him somewhere away from the public. He is unsteady on his feet and she wordlessly checks her stride. Edmund finds the tense cold stiffening his whole body thawing with just this simple semblance of kindness in contrast to the demanding mastery of the tundra within.

The window is still there, but is no longer tantalizing.

Edmund senses Peter before he catches the glint of his golden mane and the concerned blue of his eyes. But it is not a cruel shade, like the pool of the solitary beam of the window, but alive and so very _Peter’s_.

Peter’s lips part in a helpless yearn to protect as he catches his little brother’s unnaturally blanched face before he is doused in the sea of bodies.

Edmund returns his gaze to the flickering pools of warm lantern light on the floor. A door closes behind him as they have entered a separate room and Lucy guides him into a seat.

Her eyes search his, seeking to unmask his true emotion, but there was no need. It is over.

“Oh, hang it all,” Lucy says. It is the closest thing to a curse that had ever left her lips.

The corner of his mouth quirks up. Comfortingly. _Painfully_.

Edmund shrugs nonchalantly. Because he will be alright. _He has to be._

“It was just one of those nights,” he says almost wryly.

The wind shrieks again in its tireless mad hunt. Lucy’s hand tightens around his and he smiles. Whatever may be said, Edmund knew the truth: she was his strongest anchor.

oOoOoOo

**A/N** : Well here is another product of my insomnia. I hope you all enjoyed! Please drop me a review as it *cough* _is literally what we writers survive off of_ *cough* would absolutely make my day!

**Special thanks to my dear beta Scribbles-on-Parchment as well as @adventurous_stranger who inspired this prose. Love y’all!**


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